Thursday, November 6, 2008

The USAF has now discovered a fact of modern life that was first discerned by Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton:' that C = the speed at which your indiscretions are blasted around the planet.

Reviewing the comments on the thread started by Dave Fulghum, though, the question that occurs to me is this: How will the world's fighter marketeers, who knock Jesuits into a cocked hat when it comes to lining up arguments pointing to a predetermined conclusion, play this? A few thoughts:

Everyone who isn't JSF, including F-22 capaigners, will renew their attacks on JSF's current missile limits:' four internal AMRAAMs, no internal AIM-9X.

Boeing people will be trumpeting the fact that they have two in-production fighters with working, export-ready AESAs.

Raytheon and Northrop Grumman will be pushing their new retrofit AESAs.

Rafale people (once they have gotten over the imputed slurs on the French warrior mentality) will be pointing out that they were 'sucking up the trons' in order to cue up IR MICAs with Spectra and launch silent attacks, while simultaneously tossing cows at the invading English knyggets. Didn't notice the IR MICAs on the Rafales at Red Flag?

The Gripen guys will observe that if a MiG-21's small size makes it bad news, do you want to go up against a MiG-21-size jet with an AESA and a load of Meteors?

French pilots flying the new Dassault Rafale appeared to be collecting electronic intelligence on India’s even newer Su-30MKI aircraft during a September Red Flag exercise at Nellis AFB, Nev., contends a USAF pilot briefing retired U.S. generals.

The French were originally going to bring the older Mirage 2000-5 until they discovered the Indians were bringing their new Su-30MKIs, he said. They then switched and brought their Rafales with more sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment.

Aviation Week has a full article for AWIN subscribers on the pilot's observations (Update: We've posted it to our homepage here.) The video was made available online at YouTube.com, and our friend Stephen Trimble at The Dew Line has blogged about it there as well.

Foreign air force officials admit that they anticipate intelligence-gathering will go on at an event like Red Flag. India’s Su-30MKI carries the Bars radar developed by the Tikhomirov Scientific Research Institute of Instrument Design (NIIP), which also designed the Irbis passive electronically scanned array radar for the Su-27SM2 (Su-35). NIIP also is working on the radar suite for Sukhoi’s fifth-generation fighter design, the T-50, to meet the Russian air force’s PAK-FA requirement. Indian pilots told Aviation Week that they were operating the radar only in the training mode, which limited its range and spectrum of capabilities.

Once at Red Flag, ‘90% of the time [the French] followed the Indians so when they took a shot or got shot’ they would take a quick shot of their own and then leave,’ he said. ‘They never came to any merges’ which starts the dog fighting portion of any air-to-air combat. He contended that French pilots followed the same procedure during Desert Storm and Peace Keeping exercises. When U.S. aircrews were flying operations, the French would fly local sorties while ‘sucking up all the trons’ to see how U.S. radars worked, he said.

But the U.S. apparently isn’t ignorant of the Su-30MKI’s radar either. The Su-30 electronically scanned radar is not as accurate as the U.S. built active electronically scanned radar carried by the F-22 and some F-15s, he said. Also, ‘it paints less, sees less’ and is not as discriminating.